cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
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Saying distrust is an ad hominem is one of the takes ever, lol. And that’s what all of this boils down to, trust. Do we trust Meta with not exploiting all of our data, and turning it against us at the earliest opportunity? Do we trust Meta that they want to contribute to the fediverse, and not just hurt it because it’s a competitor?
By the same logic, blocking or banning a person instead of vetting every post and comment of theirs would also be an ad hominem. But at the end of the day, it’s just practical. Meta has a long and not so proud history of being extremely anti-consumer, and shoving that track record under the rug, trying to absolve them of responsibility and consequences for their actions, under the thought-terminating cliche of an ad hominem is neither productive nor practical.
Yes, people are mad at Meta, and yes, the distrust means their actions are scrutinized more than they otherwise would be, but that doesn’t mean that their actions aren’t actually massively anti-consumer, and that they aren’t a massive liability. In this particular case, you can make the argument that they had a legal obligation to hand over the data, had they not tried to build a walled garden with no privacy they wouldn’t have had the data to hand over to begin with.
(also, unrelated: you can embed images using the
syntax, and you can even add alt text in the brackets to help users with screen readers)I think the simpler answer is more likely to be correct. The Fediverse isn’t big enough to really bother Meta, but ActivityPub is a convenient way to seem cool, so they’ll partially support it as long as it doesn’t cost them all that much. Once the marketing gimmick has run it’s course, they’ll drop it.
I think the same was true for XMPP. I don’t think they planned to kill XMPP and I don’t think they plan to kill ActivityPub. But they did kill XMPP, and they’ll probably kill ActivityPub by accident as well when they support it just well enough to pull people over.
So I’m not worried about some Meta conspiracy to kill ActivityPub, I’m worried about getting steamrolled on accident for a similar reason that people don’t want to share locations of where they took pictures: they don’t want the big mass of people coming to destroy something unique.
So my recommendation is to push for making everything E2E encrypted by default, and have every message cryptographically signed by the contributor. If there’s something ad companies hate it’s privacy, and that’s what we should be pursuing. I’m not sure how that works for Lemmy, but surely there’s a way for instances to manage who can decrypt messages.
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i mean, the root comment of this chain literally says “how about we defederate them because / not because”. it’s not exactly an unrelated topic.
whether or not it’s okay to defederate from someone just because they’re evil is a good question though, but i still don’t think it’s an ad hominem. an ad hominem, in the popular understanding and in the sense presented in your pyramid chart, is a fallacy of devaluing an argument because of the one who said it. it’s like i said “i don’t believe gravity exists because it’s the zuck who said it”, not “i don’t trust the zuck as a person and therefore don’t want to work with him”.
i think the argument you present here takes ad hominem to an absurd extreme, where literally any discussion of a person would become an ad hominem. it could technically fit a definition of an ad hominem, and yeah, a lot of arguments are just arguments of definition where we posit that the other person discusses the topic with our own definitions, by which they’re obviously wrong. so to avoid that, yeah, under this definition it would be an ad hominem, but under this definition it means little that something is an ad hominem, discussing a person doesn’t automatically devalue an argument.
the thing that earned ad hominem its low spot on your pyramid are the incorrect and baseless conclusions inherent in the former definition presented here, not the mere presence of a person in the argument. your latter definition is definitely valid, but it’s unconventional and isn’t consistent with the pyramid.
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in a thread where we’re discussing how meta helped religiofascists violate someone’s human rights “meta is evil” is a summary, not an ad hominem
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That’s true. A lot of Reddit culture is cringe as well
Abstraction is a cancer to society. Their comment was not ad hominem, yours however is hairsplitting to give rise to a conflict that never existed. If you are trying to correct misinformation, you do not really seem that articulate in conveying your word.
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